The film is a true story that feels fake, perhaps best savoured as an extended
piece of charcuterie porn.

I, I, I: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love is a travelogue to Italy, India, and Indonesia. It’s also a trip into selfhood, an attempt to understand who she is and what she wants in the wake of a broken marriage. Published in 2006, it seems to have been in the international bestseller charts since AD1500. Eat Pray Love the movie — note the lack of commas: it’s an early sign of how the ironies and subtleties of the author’s prose have been shed in the transition to screen — seems to last about 500 years.

This is odd. It has all the ingredients of a tear-jerking, heart-swelling crowd-pleaser. It’s a Woman’s Own Story targeted at a constituency that — give or take the odd Sex and the City or The Devil Wears Prada — is underserved. It has oodles of mouthwatering food in it that will appeal to cine-gastro enthusiasts. And there’s more: the almost universally popular A-lister Julia Roberts in the lead role; a great supporting cast that includes James Franco and Viola Davis; sumptuous locations. It’s even directed by Ryan Murphy, creator of buzzy, popular television series such as Nip/ Tuck and Glee.

What’s gone wrong?

Partly it’s a matter of set-up. Murphy and co-writer Jennifer Salt introduce and dispense with Gilbert’s husband Stephen (Billy Crudup) peremptorily. He’s barely fleshed out at all, coming across as both a cold fish (in which case divorcing him hardly seems a cue for a mid-life crisis) and a well-meaning guy whose main crime is that he ditches his job in order to go back to college (a gesture of self-improvement that Gilbert appears callous for being annoyed about).

Gilbert is meant to be an Everywoman. It’s hard, though, not to feel envy at her large and attractively decked-out house.

How can she afford it? The filmmakers don’t tell you that she was already a critically feted and commercially successful writer, one of whose journalistic pieces was made into Coyote Ugly (2000). Nor do they advertise the fact that she had a book deal in hand when she decided to take off abroad for a year. She’s no Shirley Valentine: she has, by most people’s standards, a plush life, the comforts of which she isn’t jeopardizing by making her trip.

To point to these details, all of which are there in the book, is not to suggest that Gilbert’s experiences can’t be shared. In Italy, during the first and most enjoyable leg of her peregrinations, it’s all you can do to stop yourself from purring with pleasure as she’s taught the language by a blindingly handsome instructor (Luca Argentero), wanders by its atmospheric cobbles and town-centre fountains, and learns what real spaghetti should taste like. If this is heartbreak — sometimes Roberts is shown looking pensive or wistful — who would not sign up for it?

The Indian leg of her journey is less enthralling. Gilbert goes to an ashram where she encounters fellow-pilgrim Richard (Richard Jenkins). He’s Texan, a recovering alcoholic, and a rather tetchy dispenser of hokey maxims; yet — for Roberts is never convincing when she plays cold, stand-offish characters — he warms to her instantly. There’s little drama at stake here, though: you’re left with his dull wisdom, a slackly rendered friendship between Gilbert and a younger girl (Rushita Singh) who’s anxious about her upcoming arranged marriage, and a biding impression that Murphy can’t wait to skip forward to the film’s 'Love’ section.

Ah, love! Would that every odyssey in pursuit of self-discovery would lead us into the arms of Javier Bardem! He plays Felipe, a Brazilian divorce who kisses his son on the lips, compiles so-so mixtapes for Gilbert, and is a good deal younger than the man the author ended up marrying.

The pair’s burgeoning courtship is intercut with scenes featuring a pair of healers (Christine Hakim and Hadi Subiyanto), but by now you’re likely to be looking at your watch - the film drags on for 140 minutes — and offering your own prayer: that Gilbert and Felipe stop jaw-jawing and start paw-pawing.

In the end, the film is far less affecting or thought-provoking than the book. Robert Richardson’s cinematography is gorgeous — as is almost everyone who appears on screen — to the extent you feel you’re looking at a high-end tourist brochure. Murphy doesn’t help: he indulges in fancy tracking and aerial shots, gives short shrift to characters such as James Franco, who plays Gilbert’s post-divorce lover, and struggles to find his rhythmic footing.

Roberts, it’s fair to say, doesn’t look much like Gilbert. She’s never going to struggle with 'Love’. It’s hard to stifle your laughter when she and a Swedish friend (Tuva Novotny) are shown struggling to squeeze into new outfits: both of them are beanpole thin. At moments like these, and there are many of them, Eat Pray Love becomes a true story that feels fake. Perhaps it’s best savoured as an extended piece of charcuterie porn.

Eat Pray Love: Seven Magazine review, by Jenny McCartney

Seven rating: * *

I have a few bits of advice regarding Eat Pray Love, which stars Julia Roberts as Liz Gilbert, a New York writer who leaves a marriage and goes on a long voyage of self-discovery to Italy, India and Bali.

Eat before you go into the cinema, because you’ll be following Liz on her emotional travails for a whopping two hours and 20 minutes. Pray that Liz finally locates her inner Pollyanna. And love the way that the newly liberated Liz exhorts her calorie-counting friend to wolf down an entire Neapolitan pizza by promising that they will just buy bigger jeans, and then is filmed heroically squeezing into new trousers that must be, oh, at least a size six.

The best-selling book on which this is based, while wittier and more complex than the film, promotes the same essential messages. Don’t beat yourself up about failed relationships. Enjoy some nice food. Put the divine being inside you on speed-dial.

Have guilt-free sex with men who seem different from your ex-husband (in this case both James Franco and the redoubtable Javier Bardem, trying his best to infuse some mischievous life into a soppy labrador of a Brazilian lover called Felipe). While you’re at it, hey, why not feel the sun on your back and have a splash around in the sea too?

I don’t have a problem with this stuff, even if it does remind me of the kind of advice regularly dished out by an upbeat psychologist called Tom Crabtree in Cosmopolitan magazine during the Eighties, or the lyrics to that Charlene song I’ve Never Been To Me.

But it doesn’t work as a film plot: although finding yourself might be fun, watching someone else find themselves is up there with spending a month taking notes at a vehicle repair centre. It’s momentary relief when a restless Texan in an ashram (Richard Jenkins) provides a glimpse of genuine wrestling with despair rather than mere discontent.

As played here by Roberts, whose instinctive gleam on screen often promises more than her character can deliver, Liz seems a nice enough woman, but ferociously, earnestly self-obsessed: you wouldn’t want to sit next to her on a long-haul flight.

The atmosphere throughout is one of intense self-consciousness. When Liz leaves her mysteriously unsatisfactory husband (Billy Crudup) and goes to Rome, she sits eating a plate of spaghetti with a thousand incredulous eyebrow-raises and chuckles that say: 'Here I am, a woman alone, actually enjoying a plate of spaghetti. Mmmm. Can you believe it?’

She and her exuberant Italian friends play a game of thinking of words for cities. The word for Rome, with self-congratulatory predictability, is 'sex’. The word for London is 'stuffy’. The more I watched of the relentless unbuttoning of Eat Pray Love, in my London screening-room, the more I warmed to stuffy.